Nobody Lives Upstairs

Nobody lives upstairs. Naomi Kearney has been told this clearly enough, and an empty flat ought to be a simple fact. Yet the building she experiences does not settle into the account other people give her. The supposedly unoccupied space becomes a presence in her life, drawing her attention to something that should require none. Reassurance only makes the contradiction harder to ignore.

For Naomi, the question begins close to home. A building is made familiar by the people who inhabit it, the boundaries between their lives and the ordinary knowledge of who belongs where. Once that knowledge becomes uncertain, familiarity starts to fail. The flat upstairs is no longer merely somewhere else. Its apparent emptiness changes how she understands the place around her.

There is the building as it is described, and the building as Naomi encounters it. Neither version simply disappears because the other is easier to explain. Somewhere between them is Anna, whose place in the mystery cannot be resolved by repeating that nobody is there. Naomi must confront the gap between an answer offered by others and the experience she is being asked to set aside.

Leaving the question alone would mean accepting a certainty she no longer feels. Pursuing it means allowing the uncertainty further into her life. As she is drawn towards an explanation, the possibility of understanding becomes inseparable from the possibility that understanding will offer no comfort. Some truths do more than settle a dispute about what is real.

Nobody Lives Upstairs is a supernatural story about an ordinary space made deeply unfamiliar. Naomi's need to know takes her towards a presence that refuses to fit the building's accepted story—and towards an answer that may prove much harder to live with than the doubts that first led her there.